Abstract
This paper examines the efforts of the European Union to advance Security Sector Reform and to bridge the gap with the Judiciary Sector Reform and the rule of law in the Occupies Palestinian Territories. Since the 1993 Oslo Accords, the EU engaged actively in the state-building project in the Occupied Palestinian Territories by taking a number of initiatives in situ. Security has been a key issue in all Israeli-Palestinian agreements concluded during the post-1993 Oslo interim period up to 1999 and then, with the resumption of the Palestinian intifada in 2000, security became primordial to all internationally-sponsored diplomatic initiatives and peace plans. The article analyses the EU initiatives undertaken to help the Palestinian Authority reform its security and judiciary sectors, and argues that while the European Union has, in theory, supported the rule of law perspective in Palestinian Security Sector Reform, in reality it has not paid much attention to improving democratic civilian oversight and accountability.
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Dimitris Bouris has recently completed his PhD at the University of Warwick entitled ‘State-building without a state: The European Union’s role in the Palestinian Territories after the Oslo Accords’ and works at the Council for European Palestinian Relations (CEPR) in London. Dimitris Bouris gratefully acknowledges the financial support of the University Association for Contemporary European Studies (UACES) whose travel grant made fieldwork for this research possible.
Stuart Reigeluth holds a Master from the Centre for Arab and Middle Eastern Studies at the American University of Beirut. He covered the Israeli disengagement from the Gaza Strip in 2005, and published essays on the Palestinian security sector for EuroMeSCo, FRIDE, and the Toledo International Centre for Peace (CIT pax) in Madrid, where he was Project Coordinator for the Middle East and Mediterranean for four years. He is a columnist at Gulf News, director of Revolve Magazine, and works at the Council for European Palestinian Relations (CEPR) in Brussels.
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Bouris, D., Reigeluth, S. Introducing the Rule of Law in Security Sector Reform: European Union Policies in the Palestinian Territories. Hague J Rule Law 4, 176–193 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1017/S1876404512000103
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/S1876404512000103